Clearly not satisfied with being the thinking woman’s sex symbol, philosopher Alain De Botton is taking on sex in a new digital venture that will attempt to position pornography – mostly the online iteration- as a therapeutic tool rather than a grubby thrill. De Botton issued a press release from his philosopher think tank The School of Life extolling the virtues of porn if executed in the right fashion. "No longer would sexuality have to be lumped together with stupidity, brutishness, earnestness and exploitation. It could instead be harnessed to what is noblest in us."

Google and Microsoft don't offer formal data ingestion services to help users get lots of data into the cloud, and neither seems set to do so anytime soon. Quite how would-be users take advantage of the hundreds of terabytes both offer in the cloud is therefore a bit of a mystery.

Hacktivist group Anonymous continued its attacks on the Indian government and creative industries at the weekend by taking out the web sites of the national CERT and the country’s President in retaliation for widespread blocks on video and file sharing sites.

Analysis Google has finally won approval from Chinese anti-trust authorities for its $12.5bn takeover of handset maker Motorola Mobility, removing the final major obstacle to the deal, but analysts believe the securing the long-term success of Android will be the Chocolate Factory's priority, rather than producing hardware.

A range of organisations from across the global creative industries have formed a coalition with the aim of developing a universal standard framework for licensing out use of their copyrighted material.

Security watchers are warning users about a new worm that spreads via Facebook's instant messaging feature and also inserts itself under the guise of misleading messages on other social networking websites and IM services.

Geek Treat of the WeekThere are AirPlay speakers and there are AirPlay speakers. This unit from Danish hi-fi gods Bang & Olufsen is eye-wateringly expensive but has plenty of features, including a built-in re-chargeable battery which, B&O says, will give you eight hours play time on one charge.

Subscribers to T-Mobile's Hothouse - a focus group-like mailing list - got an added benefit this morning: the email addresses of everyone else on the list. The gaffe was swiftly followed by an apology and a request to delete the offending information.

How much would your iPhone be worth to you if the only music it could play had been bought on the device itself, from Apple? If your answer is "a lot less" or "not very much", then you're not alone. New empirical research has attempted to measure how much we value the ability to copy our music across formats and devices – and it's a significant sum.

AnalysisThere’s an elephant in the room as Parliament’s informal inquiry into intellectual property policy rolls on. In the foreground, there’s the role of the officials who are supposed to support it. In the background, there’s something more troubling.

AnalysisThe mobile device data extraction system that has just been rolled out by the Metropolitan Police is designed to provide an easier way to slurp evidence from the mobile phones of suspects brought into custody. But some argue that the move is likely to change how crimes are investigated while it raises several data retention and privacy concerns in the process.

HPC blogMy article about NVIDIA’s new VGX virtualised GPU being a potential holy grail for task- and power-user desktop virtualisation inspired reader comments that are well worth addressing. They also brought out a few details that I didn’t cover in the article. First, let’s address a few of the specific comments.

The IT universe is seeing a massive collision taking place as the worlds of high-performance computing, big data and warehousing intermingle. IBM is pushing its General Parallel File System (GPFS) further to broaden its footprint in this space, with the 3.5 release adding big data and async replication features as well as customer metadata and more performance.

System maker Oracle has upgraded its version of the Xen server virtualization hypervisor with its own variant of the Linux kernel to bring it in synch with its Enterprise Linux server operating system distro.

Mindspeed, sugar daddy to the UK-based Picochip, will be setting up a development lab with China Mobile to deploy cells using TD-LTE tech, but also supporting TD-SCDMA – as politics, rather than technology, demands.

IBM is gussying up its SmartCloud public cloud to make it more useful for enterprise-class customers, in the hope it can lure them away from Amazon Web Services, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others. Big Blue is also promising to put its System z mainframes on its cloud.

On the off chance that you have spare moment left in your life after checking Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, your email and your SMS inbox, Microsoft has launched its very own social network, so.cl. The site's name is pronounced "social".